


The Lost Child

by seleneheart



Category: Riddle-Master Trilogy - Patricia A. McKillip
Genre: Gen, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-03
Updated: 2019-05-03
Packaged: 2020-02-16 08:38:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18687961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seleneheart/pseuds/seleneheart
Summary: After two hundred years, Rood had hoped this day would never come





	The Lost Child

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place immediately before [Passing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18662374/chapters/44258203)

The sea was rough, the wind whipping it into a froth. Rood stared at the waves, unseeing, while he avoided looking at the man who lay in the bed behind him. Mathom had decided to die, but Rood refused to encourage him in his endeavor by watching it happen. 

_You can’t go, An needs you._

_Leave it, boy. I’m old and tired, and I’ve lost too much. It’s time._

Rood had wanted to scream at his father then, that Mathom hadn’t lost everything, that he still had Rood. But the King had lost his wife to illness, and a son to battle, and his daughter to power. And some part of Rood understood that, no matter how unwillingly. But it had been two hundred years since the battle with the Earth Masters, and Rood had thought that their lives would continue on like they had forever.

It was true that sometimes he wondered how Har and Danan’s land heirs had spent the long years, knowing that short of some unimaginable disaster, they would always be waiting, would never take the position for which they had been born. But no one in the realm wished death on Har or Danan.

But An was a different tale entirely. The internal wars between the Three Portions were legendary, made into story and song. Despite its gentle landscape, it was a restless land and the line of the Kings was long. A Land Heir in An would expect to take the Land Rule eventually. Only Ymris had a more violent history than the Three Portions.

But Morgon had ended all of it and the lands had been at peace since he took power in the realm. And Rood had never expected to face this day, knowing that his father saw him as a poor second to his lost brother Duac.

The waves were getting more agitated as the wind increased, and Rood blamed them for the salt on his face. He wiped the moisture away and turned from the window, unable at the very last to deny Mathom.

The breath from his father’s body still stirred the linens, but Mathom’s hand as Rood clung to it was already cool, his grip was lax. Grief clogged Rood’s throat like blood gone cold and thick from a never-healing maiming.

“Don’t leave me,” Rood begged, a child in terror from the shadows of the dark.


End file.
